- High-Tech Stalkers
- "How I Stalked My Girlfriend"
- The Victim's Side
- Identity Assumption
- The Wild, Wild Web
- Sticks and Stones
- The "Stalker" E-Card
- Cyber Stalking and the Law
- Cyber Stalking Facts
- Lethality Assessment Tools
- If You Think You Are Being Cyber Stalked
- Teen/Tech Stalking
- Online GamesThe New Stalker's Ground
- Online Gaming and Malware
- Would You Say It to My Face?
- National School Board Survey
- Women as Perpetrators
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Wild, Wild Web
Much of the Internet is still the "Wild, Wild Web" and remains largely unregulated. There is very little authentication of email accounts, websites, and blogs. Anyone can establish them. In an effort to lure pedophiles, law enforcement routinely establishes false identities as young adolescents. There is no validation of age, gender, sex, or location on most free email programs; hence, it is very easy for anyone to create a false identity.
Websites are easy to create with just a bit of technical knowledge. Remember all the phony websites established to accept donations in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Imagine if a website was created using your name and image with links to such nefarious activities as pornography or even worse, child pornography. This is the modern day equivalent of scrawling "For a good time, call Jane Doe" on the bathroom wall. Someone with an axe to grind can do much damage in little time.
With no regulations whatsoever, people can put together a website for just about anything. Websites can be used for professional reasons. They can be used to sell cars, share recipes, or list team stats. They can provide critical medical information or archive history that would otherwise be lost, but they can also be built to completely damage a person's reputation, promote child sexual exploitation, or to perpetuate a dangerous infatuation.
The Amy Boyer Story
In a tragic story that took place not far from where the authors work, Amy Boyer (shown in Figure 1.5) a young woman from Nashua, New Hampshire, was murdered on October 15, 1999, by a young man who claimed to have fallen in love with her while in the eighth grade. What makes this story even more horrendous is that the young man, Liam Youens, 21, had set up not one but two websites professing his love for Amy and his plan to murder her. He made his move one afternoon as Amy left her job at a dentist's office, pulled up beside her, put his gun to the window, and called her name. Seconds after killing Amy, he killed himself.
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Detectives investigating this awful tragedy were shocked to find a website with Amy Boyer's name that Youens had built proclaiming his love for Amy. On it, he described how he had been stalking her for years. It also described the killing in detail, exactly as it eventually happened. "When she gets in, I'll drive up to the car blocking her in, window to window," the website read. "I'll shoot her with my Glock."
The website had existed for almost two and a half years. It should be noted that there are millions of web pages are out there, even today, that few people stumble upon unless they have a specific reason to go to them. No regulatory authority can oversee the billions of pages that change each and every day. Websites are coded with "metadata" that lets them be located by search engines. For example, if you type in "Cyber Crime Fighters," you'll likely be taken to the "official" website of www.cybercrimefighters.biz. That is because the website contains "metadata" to tell the search engines where to find it. However, if someone doesn't search for it in the first place, a website could be out on the Web for years and never receive any visitors. That's why no one ever stumbled upon the site Youens created.
The websites were immediately taken down after the murder. According to authorities, Youens had also used the Internet to buy Amy Boyer's social security number from an online company called DocuSearch. He paid $45 for this information. Using false pretenses, he was able to find out Amy's employer address and phone number.
In 2000, as part of the Violence Against Women Act, Congress extended the federal interstate stalking statute to include cyber stalking and adopted Amy Boyer's Law (42 U.S.C. Section 1320 B-23 P.L 106-553), which prohibits the sale or display of an individual's social security number to the public, including sales over the Internet, without prior consent.